If You're Part Of An Elite Military Unit, Perhaps You Shouldn't Be Uploading Photos Of Your Base To Facebook

from the just-a-suggestion dept

People who have grown up with social networking type sites and applications have become used to the idea of really documenting their lives with them: providing detailed updates and regularly uploading photos of their activities. That's great for most folks -- but if you're in an elite military unit in a war zone, that might present a problem. An Israeli soldier has been sentenced to 19 days in jail after the military noticed that he'd been posting photos of the base where he was stationed to Facebook where anyone could see them. You would think that it would be common sense not to do such a thing... but common sense sometimes isn't so common.

Common sense in military

Common sense is not uncommon in IDF actually.

To remind you, our pilots never take their helmets off. This has a reason, "written in blood" so to speak.
So yes, military does have common sense here.
Apparently, individuals in the military have less of it nowadays.

Worse than that...

Re: Worse than that...

An Intelligence Unit is ACTUALLY, an Intelligence Gathering Unit. Apparently he was spending more time providing information than gathering it. The unit itself seems to need to gather more intelligent people!

Re: Re: Re: Elite

he is probably showing pic's to frieds so together they might be able to search the web for an updated map, driving directions are usefull as well... global positioning.. is important you would think ?

All Your Base Are ...

I'm in two minds about this one. If the photographs reveal anything useful to the enemy, fair enough, but if it's just stuff like him and some friends in ordinary fatigues standing together on the parade ground then it's probably fairly harmless.

Re: Jake , wrong

Technically (and this was enforced much better earlier), Israeli soldiers should never publish photographs of themselves in uniform w/out approval, for many reasons.

One being due the simple fact that many are socialist over-educated hippies that travel the world a lot (especially pilots and combat unit soliders), and if kidnapped, it eases their identification as former IDF soldiers.
It's not only about protecting secrets, it's about protecting soldiers themselves.

RE: # 9

"If it's just stuff like him and some friends in ordinary fatigues standing together on the parade ground then it's probably fairly harmless."
Not the point. Who decides what's harmless or not? Things like this can't be screened before upload so it may have seemed harmless to him but could *potentially* have had something sensitive in the photo, even inadvertently.
Since the military can't police which photo's are ok when some photos would not be ok they would have no choice but to do a blanket "No Photos" rule for anything military.

Even funnier

media hype

The thing is, lots of israeli soldiers use facebook to show photos....this is way out of line to flip out about, really.
The court went way out of line to punish for this.

Security of the base compromised? No. There are places of compromise where you are not allowed to take photos, and the military doesn't take pictures of them/nor will they let anyone else.

I have pictures of an Israeli base on my facebook from when I went there, and pictures with the soldiers...and they told us there are specific places you DO NOT take pictures. In the base entrance = irrelevant. At the frontline in the base = relevant. Taking a picture of an APC = useless. Taking a picture of the inside of an APC = very relevant.
They know this stuff and follow it bigtime. ...about photos of themselves in uniform that not only is useless but unenforceable.
Really, how hard is that to follow?

Unless they broke that, which would mean it was a stupid soldier, they knew damn well where pics can and can't go. But to just generalize that soldiers can't be in pictures, or you can't have pictures of a base, is unenforceable and unrealistic.

Re: media hype

Everything is enforceable. You throw the first 500 that publish photos of themselves in uniform to Jail (and I have been in Israeli jail for 14 days, it's not that bad), and you have 90% of the problem solved.

Duh

yeah, it's not like they threw him in jail for 10 years or anything. It's a slap on the wrist, "we're not kidding" kinda punishment, which seems fine. I wonder if he was demoted or kicked out of the military. The article doesn't mention, but that'd matter more to most soldiers than 19 days in jail.